Ryan: Carter looks better than Obama

9/3/12 2:18 PM EDT

My colleague MJ Lee reports on excerpts from a speech at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., where Paul Ryan is, as Sasha Issenberg describes it, "bracketing:"

“Friends, there’s is a little gathering going on over in Charlotte. Heard about this? Now, we know that your governor’s over there, and your lieutenant governor, and we also know that President Obama’s over there. And President Obama’s going to be giving a big speech. There are going to be a lot of speeches. Lots of words. Let me quote President Obama four years ago. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. Ladies and gentlemen, that is exactly what Barack Obama is doing today.

“You see, the president has no record to run on. In fact, every president since the great depression who asked Americans to send them into second term could say that you were better off today than you were four years go except Jimmy Carter and President Barack Obama. ...

“So when you take a look at what we’re going to hear in Charlotte today, the president will say a lot of things and he will, but he can’t tell you that you’re better off. Simply put, the Jimmy Carter days look like the good old days compared to where we are right now. And so that’s why we have a very crystal clear choice. We can either choose to stay on the path that we are on, a path of debt, a path of doubt and decline, a path of joblessness, or we can get things turned around. We can elect Mitt Romney the next president of the United States and we can get America back on track.”